Problematic Translation for Naguib Mahfouz's "The Thief and the dogs"
As what is written and always said, translating any of Naguib Mahfouz’s novels into English was not an easy task and would require a real talented and professional translator who had top linguistic, Pragmatic, semantic, cultural and social knowledge and experience of both Arabic and English.
Accordingly, there must have an advanced
understanding of the problematic and complicated rhetoric Arabic vocabulary,
textual and contextual styles and structures in order to get somewhat accepted
translation and have the intercultural gaps bridged.
Smart Translation
We
are smart translators when we analyze the phrases of the SL to identify their
communicative functions, such as referring or attributing properties to
entities and events, we look for target language vocabulary or expressions with
the same functions that fit in the context. So, we can modify some of the
lexical and structural aspects of phrases and we can also delete them
altogether, if they are deemed functionally redundant when translated. A phrase
is functionally redundant if its lexical content is already encoded somewhere
else in the sentence. For example, the relative clause "يمتهن الزراعة" is translated into “who works in agriculture”
and the Arabic sentence “لا يقرأ ولا يكتب” is translated into “who does not read or write”, and they are
lexically entailed by the nouns they modify.
This
translation can be better done if we put the general nouns or definitions of
both descriptions. So, we can say a farmer as he is someone who works in
agriculture and replace the second with an illiterate person who does not read
or write. Because these definitions are functionally redundant, we do not lose
anything by deleting them. (Mustafa
Mughazy, 2016, pp. 77-78)
The Translation of Insults
Naguib Mahfouz's "The Thief and the dogs" was full of
insults. So, translating his Egyptian Arabic insults will be very hard for any
translator. However, the following example proves that Elyas and Le Gassick
succeeded in being insiders in both cultures of both the SL and the TL. (Naguib Mahfouz, (1984) -17)
اسكت يا ابن الثعلب.
[Shut
up you son of a fox] (Adel Ata Elyas)
[Shut up,
you cunning bastard] (Trevor Le Gassick)
This example shows us that the
translators have succeeded in being insiders in both cultures of the source and
the target texts. The translation of insults is not easy as they refer to
something that is taboo in the culture, they should not be interpreted
literally, and they also can be used to express negative feelings and attitudes.
Accordingly, the translators have combined a cultural translation, bastard,
reflecting the insulting act, plus a pragmatic strategy, maintaining the
connotative meaning associated with the word ‘fox’ which is ‘cunning’.
(Mohammed Farghal and Ali Almanna, (2015), p. 95)
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